The success of the old NES was tremendous, everybody was
making games for Nintendo. Nintendo had all the 3rd party
developers locked into excluse contracts to only make games for
there system, Nintendo was successfully monopolizing the home
console market and the NES was making big bucks for Nintendo.

Usually when a new system comes out, the price gradually goes
down as newer and better consoles come out to make the old one's
obsolete,(example, when the Nintendo 64 came out in 1996, it
started out at $200, 3 year's later in September 1999 it was
already down to $100.), but that wasn't the case for the NES. The
NES was so popular that in a 4 year period from 1985-1989 the NES
only dropped down $10 in value from $199 to $189. Something had
to stop Nintendo, and something did.

Nintendo has been relying too much on the NES for there star
system. The NES was past it's time and Nintendo was still trying
to monopolize the market with it. But in 1989, two 16-bit systems
were released, Turbo-Graphix 16 and the Sega Genesis.
Immediately, sales dropped for the NES, and Nintendo released an
announcement stating they don't feel gamers are ready for 16-bit
games yet. But sales continued to drop, and so Nintendo started
to release games for the Turbographix-16 making it the system to
rival the Genesis. But the TG-16 sales were continuing to drop,
and Nintendo was constantly researching for there 16-bit
hardware. Finally in 1991 they released the Super Nintendo, and
the 16-bit gaming wars were on!

The Super Nintendo launched with 4 games: Super Mario World,
Pilotwings, F-Zero, and Sim City. Nintendo thought they'd
completely destroy the Genesis, and drive away all it's fans, but
that wasn't the case as Sega released some great games on the
SNES launch day that kept the Genesis alive. Also Nintendo
weren't holding onto there exclusive holds on publishers any
more. Many of the other publishers were now publishing for both
systems.

The Super NES pulled off some great graphics. And it had many
more colors to use from than the Genesis. It also had a hardware
feature known as Mode 7, with M ode 7 graphics, game's can freely
rotate the cameras in circles, giving the game a 3-D feel. Such
games that take advantage of this are NCAA Basketball, and NHL
Stanley Cup, and the latter Madden games. Also a breakthrough in
SNES graphics came with the release of the FX chip which allowed
for polygons on the SNES. The games that took advantage of this
pulled off high quality graphics and kinda come close to
Playstation quality games today. Some games that took advantage
of the FX chip were Star Fox, Vortex, Stunt Race FX, and Doom.
The only bad thing about the SNES was that it didn't have the
fastest processor, and Sega new this and released a game that the
SNES couldn't handle when it launched called Sonic the Hedgehog,
which eventually went on to become Sega's mascot.

The sound was pretty good for most SNES games. The background
music was way better than the horrible midis in the old NES
games. Also now most SNES game easily handle the use of voice
samples. Of course, you gotta put a limit on the amount of voice
used in the game due to how data game cartridges can hold. Sound
wasn't perfected yet on the SNES, because some of the SNES
sported really bad sound effects, but overall the SNES managed to
deliver some pretty good sound.

The SNES had great support from 3rd party developers. Square
Soft was still signed into an exclusive deal with Nintendo and it
released many popular RPG's on the SNES such as Final Fantasy 4,
5, and 6, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana. The SNES had many
games for all of the genres of games, so no gamers were left in
the cold.

All right there's the story on the Super Nintendo, let's get
down to the final ratings rundown to see how it scores.